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goran72 writes with news out of Malaysia that archaeologists have announced the discovery of stone tools more than 1.8 million years old — the earliest evidence of human ancestors in South-east Asia. Researchers believe the tools were made by members of the early human ancestor species Homo erectus. The tools actually date as slightly older than the earliest H. erectus fossils, which came from Georgia and China. No bones of that antiquity have so far been found in Malaysia. "The stone hand-axes were discovered last year in the historical site of Lenggong in northern Perak state, embedded in a type of rock formed by meteorites which was sent to a Japanese lab to be dated."

"The stone hand-axes were discovered last year...embedded in a type of rock formed by meteorites"Since the earth is only 6000 years old, the simplest explanation (Occams razor) must be these stone axes must have been created by some stone-age aliens in their big granite spaceships.

Accepting the axioma of the earth being 6000 years old, Occam's razor would cut you for introducing new entities where they are not needed. More logical would be that someone used a granite rock from outer space to create stone axes and then arrange for some scientist to 'find' them.

The Catholic Church has stated that it has no qualms with evolution (there is no "discord" between the two) which is as close to supporting something as they will likely get.
The American evangelical churches tend to hold to a 6 to 10 thousand year period with quite a number of evangelicals in those churches, including scholars, not holding to it--simply because there are multiple ways to read the first few pages of Genesis. In the end, they all remain evangelical because they all believe that God created

The meteor was real.Tektites [wikipedia.org] are found throughout the area (which stretches from Vietnam to Australia ) indicating a large meteorite impact. The stone axes are intriguing, but I reserve judgment until we get more substatial information than TFA which has about as much substantiated information in it as a von Daniken book.

at what point does a stone that happens to have been eroded/chipped naturally into the rough shape of an axe-head become a stone that has been intentionally crafted by (pre)human hands. How likely is it that these things are a case of seeing things because we want to, c.f the face in the rocks on mars

You were probably not a Boy Scout as a kid. There is actually a lot of work to make a sharp object out of a stone that is sharp and concisely sharp enough to be useful. Weather erosion like to make smooth surfaces not sharp ones. Rock chips at best will be good for poking but not cutting. So man made stone tools are actually quite different then a naturally occurring tool

Interestingly enough, there's a bunch of scientists and archaeologists who were trying to replicate the obsidian spearheads and arrowheads that you can find all over the place. Obviously you have to carefully chip the rock with another piece of hard rock...

Oh, those scientists are still unable to do what cro-magnon man could: make a simple obsidian rock pointy like an arrowhead. Something, somewhere, went terribly wrong...

Go figure.

Also interesting is that many hospitals are moving to (modern synthetic) o

Oh, those scientists are still unable to do what cro-magnon man could: make a simple obsidian rock pointy like an arrowhead.

Um, what? Obsidian knapping is practiced by many people around the world who are quite capable [primitiveways.com] of producing fine points. You can find howtos on YouTube [youtube.com], so it's far from being a lost secret of the ancients.

Best to check those overly broad claims before committing yourself to perpetuating them.

It is more of an art then a science. The Stone tools were made by crafts men of the day. Not some guy who has done a bunch of research about the past and dedicates a week or so to master a skill that took people a lifetime to master and pass to the next generation.It is like a scientist saying I can't paint like they did back the the 1700's they must be using some high tech method back then that we may have lost.

Since it is a Craftsman tool, just return it to the nearest Sears store in the U.S. and Sears will replace it, free of charge. This warranty gives you specific legal rights and you may also have other rights which vary from state to state and eon to eon.

Rock chips at best will be good for poking but not cutting. So man made stone tools are actually quite different then a naturally occurring tool

It really depends on the type of rock. Some rock, after being chipped become sharper than most modern day knives and are absolutely used for cutting. In fact, a rock smaller than the size of three of your fingers can be used to butcher an animal the size of a mammoth in about a day's time.

The wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] incorrectly refers to it as "flint knapping", whereas, i

Look it up (and maybe read the article too). There is usually a considerable amount of evidence that goes along with these axes that makes them much more likely to be tools than the result of geologic processes. This particular item was collected from a a site that has a history of producing items from an ancient culture [wikipedia.org]. Yes, there are stones out there sharp enough to be useful (e.g., naturally broken pieces of obsidian). The point isn't that they are useful, but that they have been used. Some tools are ma

The article doesn't say, but if it's a flint then the stone is incredibly brittle and takes a considerable amount of skill to work without shattering the stone. Working flint (or any stone) to a point or an edge leaves a distinctive pattern of markings on the stone which would be all but impossible to have occurred naturally as you basically need to flake off the unwanted bits of flint until you get the desired edge or point. Natural weathering of stone tends to fall into a limited number of types, predominantly rounding through contact erosion, and shearing which is usually caused by freezing water breaking a stone in two. Neither of the natural patterns are likely to lead to the organised pattern of chips that a worked stone would exhibit.

> Neither of the natural patterns are likely to lead to the organised pattern of chips that a worked stone would exhibit.

It depends. Up to this day there is a big number of inconclusive cases where archaeologists "discovered" sets of "older stone tools" but there is no clear consensus but acid disputes.

Of course when you have the nice bifacial spearpoints depicted in most books your argument is valid, but in a lot of "unifacial industries" typically oriented to cutting wood and plants, there are no such clear traces of chipping you allude. In several areas, a lot of originally "non interesting" stones are being reevaluated (always with several levels of controversy); the case is that probably most of the "stone age" tools and cultures are of this "ugly" kind.

Work with the native American cultures in Utah has shown that flint was not "chipped" into shape by striking. Arrow heads and spear points were shaped by heating the rock and dripping water on it. Thermal shock did the hard work. Yes, it took a considerable amount of work and skill to shape, but does not require impact that might shatter the rock. Pretty sophisticated technology for the day, but really all you needed was rock (flint, jasper or similar), fire, water and a steady hand. Try it yourself.

It's higher, sincea) Someone could drop/store a bunch of tool rocks together.b) If the "tool like" rocks are being formed "naturally", it may involve a process that increases the chances of other rocks in the area becoming "tool like" as well.

OMG, they probably never even considered that! It's not as if they are trained archaeologists or anything...oh, wait.

Archaeologists do make this sort of mistake, and can often be found guilty of wishful thinking. If there were a picture attached to TFA we could judge for ourselves. Being too lazy to look up related journal articles, I'm going to guess that most likely the conclusions are correct, but not beyond a certainty of about 90%.

Yep, because training by spending years sitting at desk means that they are now Ivory members of the intellectual elite well beyond us unwashed.

Little anecdote for you: Two experts are walking along, and one sees a $100 bill in the gutter and he asks his friend "Is that a $100 bill?" to which the friend replies """well it looks like it, but if it were obviously someone walking by before us must have seen it, so the fact that they didn't take it proves that it must not be," and off they walk.

I guess you have to find out the existential persuasions of the archaeologists before you can answer that question. If they lean at all toward the notion of "intelligent design", they might see evidence of some sort of design - humanoid in this case - everywhere they dig, whereas a strict naturalist might just see materials formed by unusual but nevertheless natural processes.

Skepticism and literalism are useful but much-maligned survival traits.

Well, they do have previously discovered examples of Lower Paleolithic tools to compare this find with. I think the original finds were pretty thoroughly (and skeptically) reviewed.

I don't think the comparison to Intelligent Design is very useful. In Intelligent Design, we know nothing about the Designer, the Designer's methods or the Designer's goals. There is no real experimental work being done.

In contrast, we have a pretty good idea of who made (or who would have made) these tools, what their goals were and what their methods were. Based on this, we can do quite a bit of experimentation to figure out what we don't know (or even whether or not they're tools at all).

I meant it merely as a rhetorical example, of people who are so motivated to find or justify a particular thing that it will pervert how they interpret what they find or observe. That type of personality is not absent in scientific disciplines, though it certainly should be. It all hinges on whether and how much a person becomes emotionally invested in some idea or thing. Remember the story of the Piltdown Man hoax? Even after the hoax was revealed, there were some "scientists" who for a time stubbornly

As can be seen from the first link, the object is not fractured along natural lines and is definitely axe-shaped. It is not some irregular thing that could have been formed by a boulder smashing down a river.

The material is not flint. I am not certain what it is, but it's not a flint.

it can be determined by regular shaping and chipping of the rock that doesn't naturally happen with that type of mineral. the other give away is finding more than one in the same area. even if by some random chance the rock ended up looking like an axe naturally, it won't happen 2 or 3 times more in the same immediate area.

Pretty standard stuff, and a question that was asked and answered a long time ago.

Yeah, the difference is, here on Slashdot, you get modded +1 Insightful for asking a painfully obvious question that scientists have already put to bed, presumably because it is assumed, here, that scientists are actually really fucking stupid.

If the axe-heads and whatever (they say "tools", plural, so I assume there was more) have holes roughly appropriate for a handle, they have a good chance of being actual tools. The article was lacking in pictures, though.

The chipped stones used by Homo Erectus don't look much like instruments, anyway. The answer is: if the rock has marks it was used as a tool (for example, tiny but characteristic scratches along the "blade": sometimes it is even possible to tell what kind of material a stone tool was used to cut by looking at those scratches), or if it is associated (in the same strata and close by) with items that are indubitably made by humans.

There are rocks that look very much like tools early hominids would have used,

at what point does a stone that happens to have been eroded/chipped naturally into the rough shape of an axe-head become a stone that has been intentionally crafted by (pre)human hands.

Well, a technical answer to your question would probably take several dozen papers in the realms of the neurobiology and psychology of image processing, with all sorts of excursions into computerised image processing etc. Add in some/.-isms about automated facial recognition by CCTV and you've got 2/3 of the thread that it w

This stone tool is clearly a relic left behind from the Jurassic Elves, whose reign over Earth was ended almost two million years ago by the collision of the Shield of Immortality with the Sword of Penetrating Awesomeness. The world was torn asunder and all evidence of these majestic elfy creatures was lost to the massive geological events spanning between then and now, which simultaneously wiped out the Dark Dwarves of the Deep (having set up their vast cavernous cities under dormant volcanoes and all).

Unless the talking snake people are right and was infact placed by a monotheistic/polytheistic combo deity to fool everyone into thinking he doesn't exist, so that he can punish said people with eternal suffering.

It could also have belonged to the Migit, the first being to be crafted by his Noodliness' divine appendage. RAmen.

I have no problem with the imterpretation that these are stone tools from 1.8 MYA (and you can tell by my pretentious use of the "MYA" abbreviation that I was once on the road to related Ph.D.).

But I don't understand this:

The stone hand-axes were discovered last year...embedded in a type of rock formed by meteorites....

How or why were these tools embedded in rock formed by meteorites? This rock was either formed before or after the tools. If formed before, they could only have been embedded manually, by H. erectus miners, I guess.

If the rock formed later, then these tools survived intact a meteorite strike, which seems unlikely. (Or was the rock formed by meteorite splash sediments?)

There is one other possibility, but it's so unlikely that I reject it: that the tools and rocks were thrown up in to the air and the whole mess coalesced and solidified.

I wish the article had more info, or I could find the original paper, although here [yahoo.com] is an AP article with a photo of the rocks.

The axe doesn't look capable of making a dent in magnetite. Much more likely is that this is a translation error. I could easily see the stone axes found being used to chip away at softer rock around a meteorite, or being hammered under the meteorite in an attempt to produce a gap large enough to lever the meteorite out.

However, this begs a question. What would they want with a meteorite? Meteoric iron was popular for swords, but iron swords weren't available for another 1,829,400 years. Art deco? Somehow,

It would be interesting if these people turned out to have a use for iron. Another thing to note is that Perak is known for tin mining. Tin is easier to work than iron so they may have had a use for it.

Possibly, but we're talking almost a million years older than the oldest known organized religion for which any evidence exists. We're talking so early that many anthropologists reject outright that such people had the mental capacity for complex ritual.

(I suspect the anthropologists are wrong on that, but the lack of any evidence of ritual worship older than about 800,000 years ago takes precedence over my personal feelings on the matter.)

Carbon dating is not the only dating technique. There are actually perhaps 30-35 different common dating techniques with useful time range from a matter of decades to billions of years, tens of billions of years infact.

Another common one is radiometric dating which gives you a range of 700 million to 50 billion years (!). In a way Carbon 14 dating is radiometric dating, it's just using one particular isotope. In reality there a many different isotopes that may be used to suit the range you need.

Since the stone tool is not organic matter, carbon 14 would not be useful. Carbon dating gets too inaccurate after 50,000 years.

Let me refrase it for the punctuation police...I though you could date only organic matter, based on carbon 14.If you're not the punctuation police, then it means you don't know how carbon dating [wikipedia.org] works.

It is a bit discouraging that there is evidence that old, of tool making beings on this planet. I would have thought intelligent life was much younger, and much less evolved, based on my personal observations.

Heck, even on this very web site, the are still arguing over vi vs emacs.

There is another movie of a captive chimp (or bonobo) hammer two rocks creating sharp edges to cut meat. But I cannot find it now. They were not designed, however, but pretty rough and unpolished. Still, good for the p

Ok, fine, you find a tool that the ROCK that it is made of dates back to 1.8 million years. So what? Does this mean that the composition of the rock changed at the time it was formed into a tool? Wouldn't the carbon dating stay the same before and after the "chipping away" of the portions that that were removed to form the tool? So the rock is 1.8 million years old, who is to say that the TOOL is not only 750 years old?

They did not date the rock the tool was made off, but the rock in the strata the tool was found in.

The bit about being "a type of rock formed by meteorites" quite probably means that the surrounding rock had bits of glass resulting from a meteorite impact. As with cooled magma, it is possible to measure the products of radioactive decay that are trapped in the rock, such as radon, who would have been freed while the rock was still hot, and determine the approximate date at which the rock cooled off. Of cour

The Dmanisi specimens were quite different. Their skull sizes indicated that their brains were not much larger than the brain of a chimpanzee. Their brains were closer in size to those of Homo habilis, a poorly understood earlier ancestral species.

In the last few years, however, the researchers collected more extensive, well-preserved skeletal remains of an adolescent and three adults. Some of the fossils resembled those of later erectus specimens in Africa. The lower limbs and arched feet reflected traits "for improved terrestrial locomotor performance," the team reported.

Over all, the fossils were "a surprising mosaic" of primitive and evolved features. The small body and small craniums, the upper limbs, elbows and shoulders were more like the earliest habilis specimens.

I am a professional early stone age archeologist, so naturally this has my attention. Unfortunately, as long as the stuff is not properly published, there is no way to ascertain the reliability of the claim. The latter will hinge on:

a) are it really stone tools;
b) is the dating reliable (and there is more to this than just lab techniques).

Without clear details having yet been published to judge those, I remain very cautious. SE Asia has a history of dubious claims for stone "tools", and dubious dates

The rock itself may be 1.3 million years old....but how do they know the Homo who sharpened it was there when it was created? Exactly....they don't. It's not like finding a fossil or something. The base rock may be ancient, but I could go in my back yard and find an old rock and sharpen it this afternoon and it doesn't prove a thing (except maybe I have too much time on my hands).